7) Control your portions
Just because you’re eating out, doesn’t mean you have to eat until you feel sick. If there’s ice-cream and you want to grab some of it, go ahead, but you don’t need to refill your bowl 3 times. Remember that the food you eat is accumulative. Just eat reasonable portions. One of the problems at social events with food is that people expect you to eat, and if you refuse to you will look weird, sometimes even rude, particularly in a family environment.
But this is when people literally refuse to eat anything there’s on the table. If you just eat a bit of it people usually don’t say anything and everyone is happy. If needed, just say that the food is delicious, but your stomach hasn’t been feeling very well today.
8) Compensate for the extra calories
This is a very powerful tool, and yet very dangerous. You basically eat less calories, either prior to the event, after the event, or both, in order to off-set the higher calories on a specific day or meal. For example if you had 1000 calories extra, you eat 500 calories less in the next 2 days. I’ve heard many competitive eaters use this method, and many are surprisingly lean for the amount of food they eat.
This has the ability to totally off-set the damage you have done, but also has a tremendous chance of going wrong. A lot of times when people do this they get into a binge cycle that is hard to recover from. I’ve seen this too many times, both with myself and clients, so avoid doing it often and/or with large compensations. It’s worth a shot if you’re serious about your diet, but if you see it’s hard to move on afterwards, accept that it’s just not the right tool for you. Sometimes it’s best to just forget about it and move on.
Life happens, and sometimes you can’t stick to your plan perfectly, but that doesn’t mean it’s a free-pass to ruin the progress you’ve been working so hard for. It’s possible to have a social life and still achieve your body composition goals, you just have to be smart about it!
About the author:
Tiago Vasconcelos is a 20 year old competitive powerlifter currently living in Lisbon, Portugal. He is a cofounder of Kratos Strength and Conditioning, through which he coaches bodybuilders, powerlifters, and the general public for improvements in strength and body composition.
